I don’t want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than...

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with...

In the same way that central banking nearly wrecked the world and created one calamity after another, bitcoin can save the world one transaction at a time.It is time for a new beginning.

There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with...

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they’re merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically...

Some say it’s wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they’d support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your...

Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law.

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my...

Service is the rent we pay for the life we have been given.

If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the...

Having a Constitutional political party is a little like telling a car-jacker, “You’re not allowed to do what you’re doing! And if you don’t stop it right now, we are going to ask you to...

Can social progress be made without government?It’s like saying ‘can happiness be achieved without the initiation of violence? Can romance be achieved without rape? Can profitability be achieved without theft? Can economic growth be achieved...

The Libertarian Party convention wasn’t much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled ‘Women of Liberty.’ All of...

When enough people realize that they are slaves but don’t have to be, revolutions happen.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Where there is commerce there is peace.

Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the...

Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels.

The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.

And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us,...

No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a...

The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not...

If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom.

The idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can’t create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from...

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

People are naturally born as Libertarians till governments and oppressive societies force them to adopt their ideologies and their ways.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

The first people to get the new money are the counterfeiters, which they use to buy various goods and services. The second receivers of the new money are the retailers who sell those goods to...

I’m not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers. I’m scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be “authority”, and so do their bidding, and pay for...

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.

And it started out fun. We were chattering enthusiastically, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. But as the evening wore on, and the numbers rolled in, it got quieter, and I found myself becoming...

When people start talking about Right and Left, they stop talking about right and wrong.

my child” and this intensive child-rearing.

The instant that any government obtains a monetary printing press, it becomes a deeply dishonest government, empowered to rob people by stealth. A government with the power to print money knows no limits.

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being...

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is ‘being offended’.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as...

The libertarian philosophy doesn’t explain the best way to grow a vegetable garden!” Why do some people talk as if there should be one concept or principle which is all you’ll ever need to know...

Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible...

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.

Commerce tends toward rewarding inclusion, broadness, and liberality. Tribal loyalties, ethnic and religious bigotries, and irrational prejudices are bad for business. The merchant class has been conventionally distrusted by tribalist leaders — from the ancient...

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

Government should never be able to do anything you can’t do. If you can’t steal from your neighbor, you can’t send the government to steal for you.

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.